New Morris Jeff Community School has everything kids need except a playground

What struck me first when I walked into Morris Jeff Community School last week was not how beautiful and full of light it is, not the smell of newness. It wasn't the shiny state-of-the-art equipment or the performing arts area or the computer lab.

What struck me was the smiling faces of the children. They looked almost awestruck, as if they couldn't quite believe this place was theirs.

The three-story building opened earlier this month at 211 S. Lopez St. in Mid-City, the former site of Fisk Howard Elementary School. This school year, Morris Jeff is pre-K through sixth grade and will add seventh grade in the fall and eighth grade in 2016. The third floor is for science labs and classrooms for the upper grades.

"When I ask the students what they like best, some of them say the library and some of them say the gym," Perkins said. "But what I hear most is, 'I love my classroom.'"

The classrooms are large and bright and can be configured to suit the teachers' and students' needs.

"Every child is different, but if you're a child struggling to hold your emotions through the day, it helps to have a place where you're comfortable, where you feel safe," Perkins said. "And the teachers talk about how the classrooms facilitate their work. The learning space and the teaching space -- that's what everyone loves so much."

The only thing the school lacks is a playground because the FEMA funds that built the school didn't cover building play areas. That's one of the things that brought me to the new school: the parents' drive to build a playground for their kids.

I first heard about it from Maria Montoya, who contacted me a few weeks ago. She said she was passionate about helping to raise money for the playground because of her son, Press Weaver, 4, who finally has found a school he loves. Press has Asperger's syndrome and ADHD and had struggled to fit in at previous preschools.

"Recess is Press' favorite subject," Montoya wrote in her email. "Each day when I ask him why, he says to me, 'It's the only place where I am good, Momma. I don't get in trouble and I am the best at building blocks and having fun.'

"Slowly, Press is learning to tolerate the noise and chaos that comes along with being in a mainstreamed pre-K4 classroom," she wrote. "When he is out on the playground, Press can sit by himself or join friends. He can build castles and forts, and hide from the noise as he wishes. It's truly his favorite part of every day."

I'd been wanting to revisit Morris Jeff since I'd gone to the school in December 2011, a year after it was reborn in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. At that time, it was housed in a former office building on Poydras Street. (It moved to the Holy Rosary Campus on Esplanade Avenue when it outgrew that first building.)

I'd gone to the school on Poydras Street to write about a special gift -- 12 stained glass windows made by young artists from Germantown, Pa., with designs reflecting the culture of New Orleans. The students had decided to create a gift for New Orleans schoolchildren because of everything the city had suffered from the storm, and their teachers explained that they had chosen Morris Jeff because of the school's commitment to diversity and excellence in education.

That day in 2011, I also was struck by the faces of the children. I saw faces of every shade and children with a variety of heritages. And I realized, as I looked around the room, that in 20 years of visiting public schools around New Orleans I'd never seen such a thing before.

So I went to the new Morris Jeff, not just to write about the playground, but also to learn more about the unique school and how it came to be.

The open enrollment charter school is roughly 45 percent black, 45 percent white and 10 percent Hispanic, Asian and other ethnicities. And 12. 5 percent of the students have special needs.

"There's a little bit of everything in this gumbo," Perkins said.

Aesha Rasheed, a former Times-Picayune education reporter and one of the school's founders, told me that was meant to be.

Rasheed got directly involved with public schools after Hurricane Katrina.

"When I first came home in October, I realized I didn't see any children," she said. "I thought, 'We can't live without children in New Orleans.' I wanted to see children and see them living and thriving in our community."

Month by month, as families struggled to come home, she saw how difficult it was because so many schools remained closed. As they began to reopen or become new and different schools, parents needed help getting information and navigating their way through it, and Rasheed became the editor of The New Orleans Parents Guide to Public Schools.

"The first edition was just a roadmap for getting kids enrolled in school," she said.

The ninth edition came out this week.

While working on the parents guide, Rasheed, a Mid-City resident, became involved with a group of her neighbors who were trying to get Morris F.X. Jeff School on Rendon Street reopened. She had gone to one of their meetings to hand out guides and eventually became part of a steering committee working to reopen the school.

That idea evolved into planning a new, open-enrollment public school that would reflect the community that surrounded it -- one that was socially, economically and ethnically diverse.

"People talked about how segregated schools had been so scarring and damaging to them," Rasheed said. "They really spoke to how important it was to have an integrated school."

Members of the community coalition wanted a school where every child would feel welcome, including those with special needs. They wanted a school where parents would be involved and where children of all races, religions and cultures would learn to work and play together.

"We wanted to create an amazing beacon that shows, 'This can happen, and all families deserve this,'" Rasheed said.

Along the way, organizers chose Perkins, who had been an administrator at Lusher Charter School, as their leader.

"My heart told me I needed to do this," Perkins said.

Now, they have their beautiful new building which Rasheed calls "an amazing space that can hold our dream for the school."

All they need is a real playground.

"Parents have been raising money for five years," Perkins said. "Remember the play space at Poydras? It was a covered area of concrete."

For now, the children have recess in the gym and in a small play area next to the school, and two weeks ago special iron-tough sod was put down in the space where the future playground will be.

Ever since the parents knew the school would be built, they've been doing small fundraisers, but they have a ways to go, and Sheldon Williams, father of fourth-grader Saniya Sullivan, 9, has set up a crowdfunding campaign for the playground on the school's website.

He is especially happy to see donations coming in this month because, until the end of January, the Ruby Slipper Cafe will match them, up to $7,500.

"They keep coming in, which is a good thing," he said.

The actual design of the playground is still in the planning process.

"The children need physical activity, and I want something that entertains their minds and causes them to think on their own, too," Williams said.

Pamela Marquis volunteers at the school and has created videos to promote the playground. She's involved because of her granddaughter, Ruby Crawford, 8, who has been a student there since preschool.

"It's made up of a group of wonderful, dedicated people," she said. "It is so brilliantly diverse. It's really what the face of New Orleans looks like."

She loves the curriculum, which encourages critical thinking, cooperation and caring, and she loves that all children are welcome at the school.

"They make a huge effort with the kids who are physically challenged and mentally challenged," she said.

And she knows the playground will fit right in with the Morris Jeff philosophy.

"It's all about helping children become the best human beings they can possibly be," she said. "It's what every school in New Orleans should be like and could be like."